


Still Life, With Predacons

by Infini



Series: Predababies [1]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Alien Biology, Gen, Nesting Instincts, Predacons, Really Angry Predacons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-13
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-04 11:59:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1080746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Infini/pseuds/Infini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bumblebee and Smokescreen's investigations of a ruined Cybertronian city uncovers more than just supplies and derelict buildings.  It seems Vector Sigma isn't the only thing producing new life on their homeworld.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Predacon biology is more complicated than it looks.  
> But who wants an essay on that, when they can read about two 'Bots getting in trouble? :D

One Cybertronian Elite Guard and one scout-turned-warrior were currently occupying the roof of an abandoned building.  They were ostensibly undertaking an exploration of what remained of this city, perched on the edge of the Sea of Rust, but it hadn’t taken long for the two young Autobots to make a game out of it.  There was no one to frown on the mission’s treatment, as Bulkhead and Wheeljack were several kliks behind, respectively evaluating structural integrity of the few buildings that had remained intact, and coming up with demolition plans for those which weren’t.  Bumblebee and Smokescreen had gotten the impression this wasn’t considered a chore for anyone involved.

Since neither of the two had any experience with engineering, of either the constructive or destructive varieties, they’d taken the task of searching the ruins for anything useful, as well as mapping out the general area.  This involved a lot of running, jumping, and poking around: activities far more suited to their tastes.  The coordinates of several promising buildings had already been forwarded to the Wreckers, who had in turn requested that the reconnaissance team not get too far ahead of them.  While waiting for the second half of the expedition to catch up, the younger mechs had decided to climb the tallest building they could find.

Bumblebee had pointed out that Bulkhead hadn’t yet cleared this one for investigation, but Smokescreen waved the concerns off.  If it had been standing for all this time, two sports cars were hardly large or heavy enough to knock the entire thing off its foundations.  Still, they both tread carefully, climbing the partially-collapsed staircases with light pedes until they reached the roof.

It seemed to have once been a terrace, part of a carbonglass dome still hanging in the air and offering some respite from Cybertron’s acid rains; the concrete beneath the arch of scarred translucent panels was noticeably less pitted than that where no protection remained.  Debris had been piled beneath it, and they were forced to climb over a large bank of rubble and rebar before finding flatter ground.

The view was still spectacular.

“Wow.”

Bumblebee stared out at the ruined city, optical apertures expanding to take in the whole scene. Collapsed buildings leaned against one another, windows cracked and metal buckled, their once-gleaming facades turned to dusty orange monochrome.  The brilliant, cloudless sky threw everything into sharp relief, and while temperatures hadn’t climbed as high as they could have, there were patches in the landscape that seemed to shimmer with heat.

“Yeah.”

Smokescreen couldn’t help but agree.  Despite living in what amounted to another version of same thing (except a lot less dusty), the sight of an entire lifeless metropolis never quite lost its impact.  It really forced home the truth of their mission: a handful of Cybertronians on what was functionally still a dead planet, trying to scrape a civilization back together.  Beside him, Bee’s EM field seemed to agree, fluctuating between awe and discouragement.  The truth was more than daunting; it was crushing.

He slung an arm across black and yellow shoulders, pulling the not-scout’s nearest pauldron up against his chest.

“Just think how awesome it’s going to be once things are up and hummin’ again!”  Waving a hand out at the dusty city, Smokescreen tried to draw it with a digit.  “We can design all the buildings!  Like… that one, right there.  We’ll make it twice as tall.  And yellow!  Then nomech’ll be able to miss it!”

“We’ll never find that much goldglass,” Bumblebee replied, but his field lost its edge under the sudden assault of infectious good humour.  “Besides, who would want to live in something like that?”

“Not live, _party_!”  He grinned, forwarding a series of images from his memory banks to Bee’s.  It occurred to him that as a scout, especially a young one, it was unlikely the yellow speeder had ever gotten to visit one of the big cities before they really started to fall apart.  “All the best clubs weren’t just decked out in lights; the whole buildings glowed!  Some of the really high-towers ones actually changed colours too, depending on the theme of the night…”

The incredulous look on Bumblebee’s face only grew as he paged through the pictures.  Some of them may have been slightly embellished by the passage of time, but Smokescreen was pretty sure most were still accurate.

“There’s no way we’d ever manage to build all that.  We don’t have enough hands-”

“You’re forgetting the newsparks!”  He squeezed Bee’s shoulders for a second longer, before releasing him so he could gesture with both hands.  “The Well’s working again!  Vector Sigma’s going to start spitting out mechs left, right, and center.  Some of them are bound to be good at this kind of stuff…”

The pair began climbing back over the debris toward the stairs as Smokescreen continued planning his grand cityscape.  It was only when he reached the top of a particularly tipsy-looking pile that he fell silent.  By contrast, his field swelled as though realization had come to him.  Bumblebee paused as well, frowning slightly at the sudden loss for words.

“What?”

“I guess I just realized…  Once the newsparks start showing up, we’re not going to be the youngest any more.”  Twisting around to glance over at his counterpart, the blue mech grinned again.  “Knock Out’ll need to find something else to call-WOAH!”

While the building seemed to be reasonably stable, the mound of wreckage was decidedly not.  Smokescreen’s decision to lean all his weight on one arm unbalanced the delicate alignment of several concrete chunks, and their supportive carbonglass panel, sending both debris and Autobot tumbling over the other side into an unbecoming heap.

Bumblebee scrambled up after, though with considerably more care for his surroundings.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, fine.”  Running both hands over himself just to make sure, Smokescreen slowly got up and checked himself over.  His mood dropped by several degrees once he realized how many new scratches he’d just accumulated.  “Aw, not again...  And Doc Knock already said he wasn’t lending me his buffer anymore.”

Bumblebee was about to raise the subject of that particular nickname, when something else caught his optic.  It must have been obvious, because Smokescreen turned to look as well, and all traces of his previous thought threads vanished.

“Woah.”

“…  Yeah.”

The debris, it seemed, had not been shoved aside by long-ago Cybertronians in an attempt to make use of what little free space was available.  Fresh scratches decorated the rooftop surface, undistorted by time or weather, and an empty circle had been formed by banking metal and glass along the ring’s edge.  However, the strangest part wasn’t anything about the space’s existence or construction; it was the large metallic globe nestled along one edge.

Abandoning his self-checkup, Smokescreen moved cautiously towards the artifact, uncertain as to whether getting within arm’s reach might be a bad idea.  It didn’t look like a bomb, and he couldn’t see any seams or wires or timers…  But that was the only thing in his databanks that remotely synched up with that sort of size and silhouette.

<Watch it,>  Bee commed, as though suddenly fearful that making too much noise might cause something to happen.  His counterpart wasn’t nearly so concerned.

“So… any ideas what this is?  It doesn’t look explosive.”  After flicking a cautious scan over the unknown objects, the blue speeder forwarded the findings to Bumblebee.  “It’s not solid, but I’m not getting any kind of dangerous trace readings…”

“Doesn’t mean it’s safe,” the former scout muttered, shifting his perch so he felt a little more stable.  He froze when another trickle of debris followed Smokescreen’s path down into the ring, but when it didn’t take him with it, he clambered aside to stand on a distinctly more stable-looking heap of cement.  “I think we should call Wheeljack and Bulkhead, or maybe- HEY!”

Apparently he’d taken too long to voice a possible course of action.  The blue guard had closed the distance between himself and the unknown object, and was resting a hand lightly on its smooth surface.

“It feels kind of warm.”

“Smokescreen, don’t _touch_ it!”

“Why not?  It hasn’t tried to kill me yet,” he replied, turning to grin in Bumblebee’s direction before something else caught his optic.  “Hey look, another one!”

A more thorough sweep of the area revealed that there were not two, but three strange capsules.  Against what was probably his better judgement, the newly-minted warrior climbed down into the ring as well, to get a closer look at the unknown objects.  It was a small comfort that his counterpart wasn’t touching the first sphere any more.

“There’s something going on here,” he muttered, mostly to himself.  “These scratches are fresh, and someone had to have cleared out this space on purpose.”

“It wasn’t any of us, obviously.  But who else would have done it?  ‘Cons?”  Smokescreen crossed his arms, finally drawing some seriousness from the situation.  “I don’t think this is Shockwave trying to frag with our heads.  He’s way too… y’know.”

Bumblebee nodded assent, running a digit along the retracted edge of his mask.

“Not Starscream either.  It could be someone else…  We don’t exactly have a lot of airspace surveillance; a whole ship could land somewhere out of our range, and we’d never know it until they showed up on our doorstep.”

But that didn’t explain anything.  Why would anyone come out to a city like this, scrape up debris, and leave three hollow spheres in it?  This reminded him of the time Raf had shown him ‘crop circles’ on Earth: mysterious shapes drawn in fields of plant life, appearing overnight.  The vast majority were proven to be hoaxes, made by other humans as pranks or forms of artistic expression.  But there was no one to do it here.  Bumblebee couldn’t imagine that any other species would have come to Cybertron in their absence, seeing as their planet was kind of on a black list, thanks to the war…

There was a rumble behind him, low and loud and most definitely not caused by unstable rubble, and he realized he was wrong.  There _was_ another species that had come to Cybertron, and it hadn’t been very long ago at all.

Both Smokescreen and Bumblebee backed away from the golden-plated Predacon perched on the edge of the circle’s banked edges.  It snarled at them, snapping fanged jaws, and advanced when they retreated.  They might have actually made it out of the circle at a normal pace, if Smokescreen hadn’t accidentally bumped into the orb he’d previously been inspecting.  The resulting roar and charge was enough to send both sports cars leaping over the wall of debris, and barrelling towards the staircase they’d originally climbed up.

“A Predacon!”

“ _I noticed_!”

Their descent was considerably faster than the earlier climb; all it took was the right motivation, and a blatant disregard for any possible damage they might be causing to the building.  The beast didn’t seem to care either, tearing steps from the staircase and leaving gouges in the walls as it charged after the pair of fleeing Autobots.

<What should we do?!>  There was no time to cycle up vocalizers, so commlinks would have to suffice.

<I don’t know!>  Smokescreen, having faced two Predacons previously, was arguably even more terrified than his companion.  <I don’t have the phase shifter, and that was the only way we got out of it last time!>

Not far from either of their processors was the knowledge that one of these things had made a wreck of Ultra Magnus.  If a mech like that couldn’t stand up to a Predacon, what chance did they have?  Precious little, as their screeching pursuer nearly sent the staircase overhead crashing down on their helms.

<Should we split up?>  Bumblebee’s stressed processor tried to come up with battle strategies, if only to give him something to focus on beyond his own rising fear.  <It can’t chase both of us->

<Not a chance!>

A black hand snatched at him, clamping over part of the yellow mech’s arm and yanking him sideways.  This had the convenient side-effect of pulling him away from a badly cracked pillar, one which shattered moments later as the Predacon’s tail smashed through it.  The brief moment of contact was more than enough to feed a burst of _fear/teamwork/stayclose_ from Smokescreen’s EM frequency, and Bumblebee decided that plan would be saved for a worst-case scenario.

They leapt through a glassless window frame and landed hard on the concrete two storeys below, rolling to diffuse the impact before transforming and racing off down the street.  But the war had not done wonders for even paving, and it was impossible to reach full speed when dodging so many potholes.  In a cloud of cement dust, the Predacon erupted through the building and came tearing after them.  The fact that it couldn’t fly was only a partial relief, because despite being ground-bound, it seemed more than fast enough to keep up.

<Wheeljack!>

<Bulkhead!>

The Wreckers hadn’t sent them updates on their current location, so they headed for the last place they were sure they’d been…  Several blocks and hard right-angle turns away.  It was one of these that caught Bumblebee; trying too hard to take the curve at speed, his back axle caught on a particularly deep crater.  His shout of shock and pain wasn’t half as core-clenching as the sound of a half-transformed sports car colliding with one of the few streetlights still left standing.

“Bee!”

Gears crunching, Smokescreen hit the brakes before transforming himself, running over and grabbing the crumpled frame by one pauldron.  Bumblebee’s optics flickered at him, fields muted and foggy; he was stunned, but still functional.  Without enough time to check him over for injuries, the blue speeder made an executive decision: he wrapped an arm around the former scout’s waist articulators, and hauled him into the closest collapsed building.

They weren’t out of sight a moment too soon, because the Predacon came roaring around the corner, tearing halfway down the block before realizing its prey was no longer racing away from it at high speed.  They had disappeared…  Their engines were no longer audible, which meant they hadn’t simply changed direction again.  They were nearby.  Hiding.  That meant they would be found.  With a low growl, it began pacing back up the street.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I changed the story summary, because I didn't like the wording. It's _l'esprit de l'escalier_ ; the fine art of coming up with the perfect thing to say, after the occasion has passed.  
> This is the final chapter of 'part one', I suppose. The second will be coming soon!

<Bee!  Come on, Bee, talk to me...>

<...  Ow.>

Resisting the urge to hug the injured mech, Smokescreen layered his fields with relief instead.  They weren’t out of the fire yet, but the situation would have been far worse if one of them ended up knocked unconscious.

<Are you okay?  Can you drive?>

<I…>  Blue optics swivelled as their owner’s focus turned inward, sifting through the pileup of errors to figure out which was really important, and which were just an annoyance.  <Scrap.  My back axle’s bent, and I think that did something to my ankle coupling.>

Okay.  Not offline, but not driving.  Or running either, and while he’d managed to haul the black and yellow frame in here, Smokescreen seriously doubted that he could carry him all the way to safety without being noticed.

<Any ideas?>

Bumblebee frowned without looking at him, carefully pressing digits around the hookups on his right pede.

<Well…>

The heavy pulse of _unity/anxiety/notleaving_ wasn’t enough to keep him from staring hard at Smokescreen, though the mech shook his head and shifted closer.  The Predacon could, and most likely planned to kill one or both of them; even if it meant saving his own plates, the blue guard had no intention of running off.  But they were pinned down, and if they got trapped in a corner, fighting their way out of it would be almost impossible…

<If you go, you could draw it away, then I can move.  You’re fast enough, it won’t catch you.>

<Nuh-uh.  If it loops back around, or figures out what we’re trying...>

Their discussion was interrupted by the crackle of a third comm.

<Where did you two get off to?>

<Wheeljack!>

An updated ping from Smokescreen, along with a rush of relief from both of them; if they’d been headed for their original location, the Wreckers couldn’t be more than a couple blocks away…  It served as a helpful distraction from the fact that they could hear the scuff of clawed pedes on the other side of the broken window they’d leapt through.  Both sports cars suppressed their fields as much as they could, cutting off engines and pressing their backs flat against the wall.  If they could just stay hidden for another klik…

It roared, scarcely an arm’s length away from them, and both jumped.  They scarcely managed to scramble away from the window before the Predacon charged, the impact leaving deep dents in the metal wall as it tried to fit through a hole not quite large enough.  Their blasts seemed to bounce off, only making the creature more furious as it heaved itself through the window frame to land heavily inside the room with them.

Smokescreen pressed Bumblebee back against the wall with one arm, the other raised to fire again, while the latter kept both blasters aimed and charged.  The beast seemed almost pleased with itself, tail lashing energetically and a deep rumble building in its chassis, but it didn’t get the chance to attack again.

“Hey, ugly!”

Wheeljack’s pede collided with the vicious maw, sending it flying into what had once been a teller’s booth of some kind.  Bulkhead appeared a moment later, firing blasts into the pile of Predacon-produced rubble.

“Get out, you two!”

They didn’t need to be told twice.  Hooking a hand underneath one of Bumblebee’s shoulder joints, Smokescreen hauled him toward the door the Wreckers had stormed through.  For once, he wasn’t at all upset about missing the fight; the sounds from inside the building were more than enough to tell him they didn’t want to get involved.

He’d just managed to prop Bumblebee up against what used to be a transit-station shelter across the street, when the Predacon burst (or was thrown) through the wall of the building it had entered half a klik before.  A huge green frame stepped through the resulting hole, wrecking ball fists already prepared to strike again, while his smaller white counterpart leapt nimbly through the empty window with both swords drawn.  Their target screeched with obvious fury, claws gouging channels in the pavement as it tried and failed to intimidate its foes.  Wheeljack began circling around while Bulkhead stood between it and the sports car pair, dividing its attention to provide the best opportunity to strike.

<And that’s why they’re called Wreckers,> the yellow mech couldn’t help but smile, relief taking the edge off both fear and injury.  His blue counterpart agreed, relaxing ever so slightly against the side of the shelter.  Predacons might be tough, but there was no way one could stand up to that kind of punishment.

Again it shrieked, fangs bared as it snapped and snarled.  But this time, an echoing scream answered.  All four Autobots whipped their heads around to see a second Predacon drop from the sky behind them, red wings flaring as it reared back on its hind legs.

Using the distraction, the first rushed Bulkhead, sending him toppling onto his back.  But instead of attacking, the beast leapt off and ran to join its partner, hissing and spitting in what was obviously some method of communication.  For the second time in as many kliks, Bumblebee found himself pressed between Smokescreen and a wall; the effective Predacon flanking manoever had left the Wreckers at the wrong end of the street.  But again, the creatures didn’t attack; they regrouped, yellow and orange beside red and acidic green.

And just when they thought there couldn’t possibly be any more flabbergasting developments, the newcomer transformed.

“ _What_ ,” she snarled, the feminine voice only registering as a dull surprise, “have you _done_?!”

Two aggressive steps towards the crouched sports cars sent Wheeljack skidding up the street to stand in front of them, one sword twirling dangerously.

“What have _we_ done?”  He made it a rhetorical question, but an inquiring ping was sent to both Bumblebee and Smokescreen.  “I think we’re the ones who should be asking questions, here.  Where do you get off attacking us?”

The femme Predacon snarled, claw-tipped tail snapping behind her.  Her helm seemed to be comprised of her beast mode’s jaws, from underneath which blazing gold optics were visible.  They flared bright at the Wrecker’s question, and she turned towards him aggressively.

“Why have you invaded our _NEST_?!”

The silence that greeted her question was not well received.   Both Predacons snarled and moved forward again, only pausing their approach when Bulkhead aimed a blaster at them.

<Bumblebee, Smokescreen, what’s going on?>

<What did you two get into?>  Wheeljack shifted his stance, grip tightening on both swords, but he didn’t make a move.  Not yet.  <Talk fast…>

Furiously paging through his databanks, the yellow mech tried to bring up anything he could find on ‘nests’.  Plenty of information on Earth creatures, and a few strut-bare files on Cybertronian wildlife, but certainly nothing about Predacons.  The images he could find did seem rather similar to what they’d seen, though; rings of building materials, designed to contain and protect...

“You _dare_ harm our hatchlings?”  The femme roared, her companion emphasizing the words with a deep rumbling sound. “Your kind try to exterminate us again?!”

“Hatchlings?”

It slipped out before Smokescreen could stop it, but his field reverberated with the same shocked confusion everyone else felt.  The obviously honest reaction seemed to shake the Predacon, whose optics flickered before returning to her aggressive stance, a glare seeming to burn holes in the blue speeder’s plating.

“Hatchlings!”  She repeated the word, vocals combining a hiss and a snarl.  “You fear their existence?  You try to destroy them before they emerge?”

“N-no!”  Both hands raised, he tried to fend off the accusations.  It still sounded like nonsense to him, but he hadn’t been trying to hurt anything.  “We didn’t even know what they were.  We were just looking around, and kind of… found them?”

<I think… I think she means ‘nest’ literally.>  Bumblebee sent a datafile to the other Autobots, containing images of the nest and its spheres, along with some pictures from the Earthly internet.  <Eggs.  Like alloygators, or cryocondors?>

<...  Well, I’ll be fragged.>  Apparently Wheeljack agreed with the theory.  <And the first thing they teach you in wilderness survival is that you don’t want to get between a ‘gator and its clutch...>

The Predacon’s rage seemed to have been subdued slightly, if only by the evident waves of confusion coming from the Autobots.  Her tail lashed from side to side, but more slowly, and its claws no longer snapped at the end of each arc.

“Explain.  Now.”

Pushing himself upright against the metallic facade at his back, Bumblebee put a hand on Smokescreen’s pauldron.  He hadn’t had much luck convincing Predaking to work together with them, but maybe this would work better.

“We were scouting,” he began, trying to keep his optics on the femme, and not the bestial Predacon that paced semi-circles around her.  “We decided to climb the tallest building we could find, to get a better view of the area so we could map it out.  While we were on the roof, we sort of… fell into your nest.”

“It was an accident,” added Smokescreen, unable to keep completely silent about the whole thing.  This kind of was his fault, wasn’t it?

Although she hadn’t stopped her glare, the flying Predacon seemed somehow less intense than before.  Once the two little Autobots had finished speaking, she turned and hissed at their initial pursuer.  The latter seemed surprised by whatever was being asked, snorting and huffing as it pawed the pavement.  A surprisingly aggressive move from the femme sent it skittering back down the street in the direction it had originally come from; within moments, it was gone.

“Did you touch them?”

“I…”

“Did you _touch_ them?!”

“Just one!”   He wasn’t sure which was worse: the sharp-edged anger directed at him by the Predacon, or the obvious looks of disapproval from Bulkhead and Wheeljack.  “I just... wanted to figure out what it was.  I didn’t hurt it.”

_Didn’t mean to hurt it,_ he meant.  Surely it wouldn’t have been damaged just by a touch?  Although he had bumped into it when that land-based Predacon showed up, too…  Still, it hadn’t been hard or anything!  That should be fine, right?  But the long, tense nano-kliks that followed were among the most uncomfortable he’d ever faced.

Finally, the winged femme turned her head slightly, and snorted.  Whether she’d decided to believe them, or the other Predacon had commed her with information on the status of their egg-spheres was unclear, but she eased out of a battle stance with surprising grace.  Even if the venomous glare hadn’t quite been mitigated, Smokescreen felt a little less likely to have his faceplate ripped off at any moment.  The easing of tensions in the fields of the other Autobots echoed the sentiment nicely.

“We’re sorry,” Bumblebee offered, for what it was worth.  “Now that we know, it won’t happen again.”

“Vertebreak does not take kindly to intruders, regardless of species.  He is far too broody.” Though her battle mask obscured most of her facial features, the Predacon’s expression seemed to have slid toward something more like annoyance.  “You are lucky to be fast.  Otherwise you would have shared the same fate as the glitchmice.”

Unsure of how to interpret the rather odd turn of phrase, the Autobots stayed silent, aside from the heavy whirr of Bulkhead’s blasters retracting.

“You would be best served to stay away from this place,” the femme continued as she turned her back to them.  “Be grateful that the others are off hunting.”

Without waiting for acknowledgement, she transformed and took to the air, rapidly rising over the ruined buildings until she disappeared behind them.  A shockingly abrupt anticlimax for everyone involved; Wheeljack waited several seconds before finally sheathing his swords, just to make sure she wasn’t swinging around for another attack.

Smokescreen flopped backwards against the transit shelter wall, letting his helm meet the metal with a dull thud.

“Okay, we can all open up our vents again.”

“Do we need to have another talk on ‘don’t touch the unknown object’, Smokey?”  The white Wrecker’s vocals were serious, but his fields lacked the edge that would have given the suggestion real bite.  “What did they teach you, in the Elite Guard?”

“I know, I know...”  The blue mech stifled a protest, knowing how very close his curiosity had gotten everyone into some serious trouble.  Bumblebee’s twisted ankle was the worst injury any of them had sustained, which was rather miraculous…  He had personal experience with how much worse it could have been.  “Thanks.”

He leant an arm to Bee, who took a moment to test his leg before concluding that it still wasn’t good enough to walk on.  That meant a slow return to base, even with the groundbridge; the rendezvous point wasn’t all that close, which meant they had plenty of time to think about what had happened.

“So… Predacons have eggs?”  Bulkhead was the first to voice what they were all thinking.

“Apparently,” the yellow mech replied, trying to figure out how in Primus’ name that made any sense at all.  He could imagine Ratchet wanting to take charge of that kind of research, if only they had some way to learn more.  Considering what they’d just been through, he had a feeling that asking the Predacons about it wouldn’t really go over well.

“Hey, do you think Knock Out knows?”  Having swapped places with Wheeljack, Smokescreen now had both arms free for gesturing.  “He was with the ‘Cons…  Maybe he’s got some idea of how it works.”

“It’s worth a try,” agreed the white Wrecker, shrugging the shoulder that wasn’t supporting Bumblebee, “he’s pretty handy around a lab.”

“Hey Jackie, what about you?  You know science...”

“Explosives, Bulk.  Not exactly related to cyberbiology.”

There were too many questions, and far from enough answers.  The Wreckers discussed the finer points of scientific departmental divisions as they walked, but Smokescreen remained surprisingly silent.  Judging by the temperament of his EM frequencies, he was thinking hard, and Bumblebee didn’t try to interrupt until he finally glanced up again.

“What’s on your mind?”

There was a moment of surprise, before the blue mech flashed him a quick, though not entirely convincing, smile.

“Do you… do you think Vector Sigma is making Predacons?”

“... I hadn’t thought about it.”  The question seemed so far out of left field that he wasn’t sure how to respond.  “Why?"

“Neither of those two was one of the Predacons that attacked Ultra Magnus and I,” he replied, optics returning to the road while an uncommon expression of seriousness took over his faceplates.  “So either Vector Sigma is making Predacons...”

“Or Shockwave is,” Wheeljack finished, letting his previous good-humoured conversation fall by the wayside.  “Even if the Predacons are capable of self-propagation, there’s no way they could gather enough resources to create two new fully-framed chassis, especially in less than an orn.”

“They didn’t say anything about Shockwave, though.  Just ‘the others’.”  Bulkhead’s field jittered slightly, but he pressed on.  “That means there’s five now.”

“Eight,” corrected Bumblebee.  “Predaking, these two, the pair from before, and there will be three… hatchlings.”

Uneasy silence settled in.  That already added up to more Predacons than they had Autobots, unless they included Ratchet.  Predaking wasn’t actively against them, but if these newcomers were under Shockwave’s control, it meant Cybertron was suddenly a great deal more dangerous.

_They’re probably not with Shockwave_ , Bumblebee thought, hoped, prayed.   _Predaking would find them eventually and there’s no way he’d stand for his own kind working for the Decepticons._

Hope for the best, someone had once said.  Then prepare for the worst.


End file.
